M.Phils

MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies students, 2018-19

Partha Chakraborty

Partha Pratim Chakraborty was born and raised in the city of joy - Kolkata, India. Partha holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Michigan State University where he was part of the Honors College. Partha was the recipient of the IC Shah Scholarship, the Slade Scholarship, the Levy Scholarship, the Global Neighbors Scholarship, the Global Spartan Scholarship, the International Tuition Grant as well as the Presidential Scholarship. Partha has always been an advocate for various social causes and has co-founded the UNICEF chapter at Michigan State University. Partha has also co-founded a non-profit organization called Education Unlocked which received extensive funding from the MSU Broad Business School. Partha’s main interests include Economic Development, Poverty Alleviation and Social Entrepreneurship. Partha is currently working on his research thesis titled “The Impact of Microfinance on Women Empowerment and Poverty Alleviation in Rural India.” Please feel free to contact Partha.
Links to Partha Chakraborty’s profiles: -
Email: ppc31@cam.ac.uk
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/partha-pratim-chakraborty/
Website: http://parthachakraborty.website/

Vincent Hasselbach

Vincent studied Social Anthropology at Cambridge, where he wrote a dissertation about contemporary documentary photographers in Dhaka, Bangladesh. His current project focuses on digital photographic archives, and the new possibilities that these afford in relation to public memory, collective identity, and memorialisation practices. A secondary strand of this research concerns how such archival projects prompt us to re-consider the archive in and of itself (as both entity and process) in contemporary post colonial South Asia.

Sergio Infante

Sergio Infante was born in Bogotá, Colombia but has lived most of his life in the United States. He received his B.A. in History from Yale University in 2018. His project focuses on Brazil-India diplomacy and cultural exchange in the nineteen-fifties, in particular, on the influence of a Brazilian concept, "lusotropicalism," on India. Lusotropicalism is the belief that the Portuguese Empire was superior to the British or the French, because Portuguese travellers were open to miscegenation and intermarriage with the "natives." The word was first coined in Old Goa, where the Brazilian sociologist, Gilberto Freyre, was living and lecturing in 1951. The idea of lusotropicalism came to bear fairly heavily on Brazilian foreign relations in the postwar period. As shown by Jerry Dávila, in his magisterial Hotel Trópico: Brazil and the Challenge of African Decolonization, 1950-1980, the concept is deployed time after time by Brazilian diplomats to rationalize their rapprochement with various African states. Lusotropicalism was also the concept that the Portuguese government used to explain away their continued presence in various African colonies, especially in Angola and Mozambique.The research Sergio proposes to conduct at Cambridge will focus on how lusotropicalist dreams played out in South Asia, the region where, ironically enough, these fantasies first came into existence.

Kalpana Mohanty

Kalpana did her undergraduate degree in History at Barnard College of Columbia University. She is currently a Cambridge Trust Snowdon Scholar focusing on gender and disability in colonial India. Her MPhil dissertation will focus on the intersection of empire with the domestic, with regards to the nuanced role of the British woman (memsahib) within Colonial India; was the memsahib wielded as a tool by British men to justify British imperialism or was she herself complicit in furthering the colonial agenda? She will focus on the period after the Indian Revolt of 1857 because of the increased tension and the greater presence of British women thereafter. She is also deeply interested in the history of disability in India and its connection to gender as there is very little research on the subject as of now, and will be pursuing a PhD on this topic.